Ian Slater (L) and Nathaniel Linville, after winning the 2026 March Merkin with nine permit. PC: Lea Luna Productions

Seven

Drake Magazine Back Issue 2026, Drake Magazine Spring 2026, Fly Fishing News, Homepage Content, Lodges, Outfitters, and Guides, Saltwater Fly FishingLeave a comment

Daybreak on the last day of the March Merkin permit tournament in Key West. The sky is virtually cloudless, the winds light. It’s not what Nathaniel Linville and Ian Slater had in mind. “We like it when it’s tough out,” Linville says. In 2024, he and Slater had won the Gold Cup tarpon tournament in horrific conditions. “Our strength is outlasting and outworking everyone else when it’s like that.”

Photo by Tosh Brown

French Connection

Destination travel, Drake Magazine Summer 2025, Homepage Content, Saltwater Fly FishingLeave a comment

A sharp sun is pinned overhead, drilling into the back of my neck like a hot desk lamp. I’m alone in a rowboat on a lake, a shallow depression with the sort of soft marl bottom that squelches unpleasantly between the toes. Its shape is the result of glacial waves that once buried northern Michigan in six thousand feet of hard, gray ice. In late June, with a ring of leafy oaks surrounding the lake and the air hanging wet and heavy, the fact that there was even snow here three months ago seems unlikely, and a mile of ice, impossible. When it’s hot here it seems like it’s always been hot, and always will be.

Scanning Sudan's legendary flats for triggerfish, permit, bones, barracuda, GTs and whatever else decides to show up.

The DrakeCast #65: A Flyfishing Trip Derailed by War

Contest, Destination travel, DrakeCast Fly Fishing Podcast, Homepage Content, Saltwater Fly FishingLeave a comment

Alex Gonsiewski is a flyfishing guide in Oregon, where he targets trout and summer steelhead on the Deschutes River, summer steelhead on the John Day, and winter steelhead on the North Oregon coast. Between rainbow runs, Alex hosts angling trips around the world. He’s taken clients to Mexico, Belize, Bolivia, Alaska, Christmas Island, and Puerto Rico.

In 2023, Alex and a group of clients flew to Sudan for nine days of fishing on the Red Sea’s Nubian Flats. Unfortunately, while Alex and company were on the water, the country fell into a vicious civil war that has since claimed the lives of 150,000 people and displaced more than thirteen million.